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Love this thread! You guys are bringing back some great memories because we've done pretty much all of the things you have mentioned so far. I did almost all of them when I was growing up too, but then I didn't have a very mainstream childhood either, even though I went to public school.

Something kind of unusual that my family does is declare an "instant adventure". Sometimes we'll be driving along and we'll just decide to turn down a road we've never been on before just to see where it takes us. When we come to a stop, I ask one of the kids which way we should go, and we just keep doing that until we find something interesting - a seldom used lane full of fall leaves that whoosh up behind the car as we drive down it, a pond with a flock of pure white egrets standing in the middle of it, an old cemetery, a tiny town we didn't know was there, a cool abandoned house, a new restaurant or store, a small rest stop by the river, a particularly picturesque farm...it's amazing the things we find just a few miles off of the well traveled roads.

Has anyone else ever created an "archeological dig" in their back yard? We have friends who raise goats and some of their goats had died, so we buried the (cleaned) goat bones and some other items in our back yard and let the kids dig them up. We had an archeologist friend who got right in there with them and told them all about things like how they set up the grids and how they clean the artifacts. The kids buried, dug, and assembled those bones many times over for several years. Occasionally I still find a goat bone while gardening :-)

When my dd was little, she loved to help clean and we often mopped with out feet and even on a big wet soapy blanket. We started out on hands and knees, but end up all rolled up together like a catapiller in a cacoon.

We are mostly night owls. I work full-time nights. DD stays up most nights and we sleep mostly all day. When there are things we want to do during any given day, we sleep around it. But, since that one was already mentioned.

We usually stay in our night clother, which for us is much less than pjs, but not quite sky clad. There is little if any modesty here. Afterall, it is just us 4 girls: dd and myself and our 2 female kitties.

Got to try that when we actually have grass again LOL! We've done similar things in the sink though. Gotta brush up on chemistry, DD is getting more into science each day *eek!*

She loves to help. So so much. I never would have believed it, since other than those relating to horses, I hated work (though I'd run myself ragged all on my own, no prompting or reward for it, when it came to working in the barn). Reminded of that old adage, do what you love and never work a day in your life, heh. She truly loves it, it's a big game to her. She's even made it fun for me. We live in 550 sqft at the moment, not a lot to clean, but DD will come to me some days and ask if we can play with rags on our bare feet and clean the floor.

We cleaned our floors with rags when we were both younger. I am nearly 50 and she is nearly 17 now.

So, today we did some biology labs in a new co-op I started. We had one other parent there, just to observe what her teens were learning. We covered 3 chapters worth of labs and had a blast. The other mom was baffled 1st at what she felt was chaos as she watched, and then at how much her boys learned and comprehended from the chaos.

We never had anything formal with anyone else, except a few (very few) museum days for homeschoolers. I was always weirded out by the parents carrying around thick piles of paper covered in questions the kids were here to answer...

For several years, our kids (with or without a few neighbours or close friends) played a very complicated, extended game of Payday Clue Monopoly. It involved tracking a lot of details in a binder, as well as several small dolls... I never found out how it was played or what it was about, and they forget now, but 'malleable' was what they always thought of game rules...

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